36 years after Nelson released their debut album After the Rain in 1990, Matthew and Gunnar Nelson are still having the time of their lives, and coming back to Niagara Falls to honour their father is something they always look forward to.
The twins are returning to Fallsview Casino’s Avalon Theatre later this month for eight shows in five days to perform Ricky Nelson Remembered, starting Oct. 14. It’s the multimedia tribute to their father that they’ve been staging, on and off, for decades. These days it’s a rare thing. The brothers have spent the last few years focused on Nelson, the band that made them MTV stars in 1990, and on playing arenas.
“We actually don’t do Ricky Nelson Remembered except for Fallsview now,” Gunnar explains. “So when we actually do get to pull out all the stops on the Ricky Nelson Remembered show, it’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of like a family reunion. It’s nice to visit with our dad on these things, you know, just to kind of go back to our roots.”
Music Life Magazine caught up with Matthew and Gunnar last month and talked about how the tribute began on a U.S. naval base in Japan, what growing up as a Nelson was really like when home life was nothing like Ozzie and Harriet, the book that finally let them tell their side of the story, and a Toronto musician they idolize who showed up at one of their shows 10 years ago without them knowing.
A “play date” at the Falls
The October shows will be their sixth time coming to the Avalon Theatre, previously playing the intimate theatre in 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2023. They talk about the venue with real affection.
“It’s really one of our favorite places to play,” Gunnar said. “That theater is one of my favorite places to play. It’s just so beautiful there.” He praised the crew as “first-rate” and said there isn’t a bad seat in the house. Then he brought up a line from their grandmother, Harriet Nelson, that the brothers clearly live by.
“Our Grandma Harriet said, ‘You know, boys, in your career, some days you’re going to work, some days you’re going to play.’ We know when we come to Fallsview, it’s going to be a play date.”
Off stage, the twins do what every visitor does. Gunnar admits to spending a lot of time on video calls, turning his phone around to show friends the view. “They’ve got a zip line, you’ve got to do all that stuff,” he said. “But honestly, it’s just so strikingly beautiful when you walk out of that hotel.”
Matthew’s favourite Niagara memory is a stranger one. On a walk during their last visit, the brothers came across a mariachi troupe performing. “It was so interesting and different and weird that we were in Niagara and there was a mariachi troupe,” he laughed. “It was kind of one of those weird moments of my life.”
They’re also glad about the timing this year. “Fortunately, this time they booked us at a time of year when it’s not 40 below,” Gunnar said. “There’s no cold like Canada cold, right off the water there. It’s bracing. But this is going to be a beautiful time of year, a great time to see a really cool rock show.”
This run also brings a new band lineup. On earlier visits, the brothers were backed by the band of bassist Tommy Vee, son of the late Bobby Vee, who, like Ricky Nelson, was a teen idol in the early 1960s. This time fans will see a different group on stage, something the twins said they’re looking forward to.
From a naval base in Japan to a celebration of life
Ricky Nelson Remembered started with the brothers getting the same request everywhere they went. “Every place we went all over the world, somebody asked us to play our dad’s music,” Matthew said. “We grew up with it. We loved it. We loved our dad; we were very close with him. But we just wanted to make sure that it was more than occasionally throwing in ‘Garden Party’ or something like that.”
He believes their father never got his due, even after selling a reported half a billion records. “To us, he was our dad and our best friend. So we thought if the moment ever came where we could put something together as a full show, we would do it.”
That moment came a few decades ago with a phone call from the U.S. military. The naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, was putting on a holiday concert for sailors who couldn’t get home. It had a ’50s theme, and the commandant was a big Ricky Nelson fan. Would the twins fly over?
Matthew had doubts. “I said, ‘Well, these kids are so young, they’re not going to know who we are, let alone our dad.’ And he said, ‘It just doesn’t matter.’ And by the way, if it doesn’t work out, nobody’s going to know about it. It’s a good cause.”
They went, and played what Matthew calls “basically an oldies show, a rockabilly show.” The 18- and 19-year-old sailors loved it. “We were having so much fun. I looked at Gunnar and said, ‘Why haven’t we been doing this? This is fun.’ I felt closer to our dad musically.”
Back home, Matthew found an editor and began going through family footage to build the visuals that are now a big part of the show. The set list came from something very personal. “The music started with a set list that our dad had in his guitar case,” Matthew said. “It was the last set that he ran when he was alive. And I thought that was a good starting point: what he thought was the best show he could do in 90 minutes.”
“You could always find a tribute show somewhere, but we look at this as kind of a celebration-of-life show for us.” — Matthew Nelson
The show has grown over the years, but its heart hasn’t changed. “People realize that it’s more than just some guys getting up there and singing some songs they know,” Matthew said. “We’re telling stories about our life with our dad and our family and what it was like growing up a Nelson. It’s very real and very heartfelt.”
The tribute is now a special-occasion event, slotted around a schedule that has included arena dates with Rick Springfield and Night Ranger. “Fallsview is a special occasion for us, and will be as long as they’ll have us,” Matthew said. “We look at it as kind of the crown jewel in our touring life.” The brothers have always said they’ll keep doing it until it’s obviously time to mothball it. “That hasn’t happened yet.”
Growing up a Nelson
Few families are as rooted in American entertainment as the twins’. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Matthew and Gunnar are the twin sons of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Ricky Nelson and the grandsons of TV icons Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, stars of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, one of television’s longest-running sitcoms. On their mother’s side, their grandparents are Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon and actress Elyse Knox, their uncle is actor Mark Harmon, and their aunt is Kelly Harmon, famous as the Tic Tac model. With acting and sports both in the family, Music Life Magazine asked what pulled them toward music.
Gunnar traced it to a specific memory: the first time they saw their father perform, at a theater at Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California. “We were babies sitting on little crates on the side of the stage, and we didn’t realize up until that point that our dad was special,” he said. “He was up there making the audience happy, and he was happy. And we just thought, man, this is the greatest thing in the world.”
After that, music filled the house. Ricky was putting together the Stone Canyon Band at home. “He always seemed to have an acoustic guitar in his hand. He was always writing songs, and there were always hippies over at the house making music,” Gunnar said. “I suppose it would be no different than growing up as a Manning in a football family. It becomes your normal. You don’t realize as a kid how special that really is. It’s just what your family does.”
The Nelsons are also the only family in history to score No. 1 hits in three successive generations, a feat recognized by Guinness World Records. It started in 1935, when Ozzie Nelson and His Orchestra, the band Harriet sang with, went to No. 1 with “And Then Some.” Ricky followed with “Poor Little Fool” in 1958 and “Travelin’ Man” in 1961. Then, in 1990, Matthew and Gunnar took Nelson’s “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” to the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
Why music, not acting?
Both brothers have Screen Actors Guild cards, and Matthew studied some acting and hosting. But they say music won because of what it lets them say.
“We’re songwriters before anything,” Matthew said. “We love writing songs. We love creating that and baring that to people and saying, ‘I hope you like it,’ or ‘I hope it becomes the soundtrack of your life.’ Acting is about being the best liar, if you think about it. And the thing about music is, music is the truth. That’s the hugest difference.”
Gunnar pointed to the live connection as well. “We have members of our family that are actors who never get that instant connection or feedback with the audience,” he said. “For us, we get to look out in the audience and see people mouthing the words back to us that we wrote. I think we’re kind of addicted to that.” Then he shared another of his grandmother Harriet’s sayings: “‘Keep in mind, fellas, the Nelsons have never been in the entertainment business. We’ve been in the connection business. If you don’t lose sight of that, you get the key to the city.’”
They say their father felt the same way, even though he earned real acting credit, including the role of Colorado [Ryan] in Rio Bravo. “He told us the one thing you don’t get on a soundstage,” Matthew said. “There’s no real interaction with anybody except the person you’re acting with. He said music is all about being in that moment with all of those people, and you can feel that energy. I think that’s why they call it playing music.”
There was a more practical reason too. “My dad hated getting up in the morning,” Matthew said with a laugh. “He said, ‘I’d get up at six o’clock in the morning and be in the makeup chair.’ That sucks no matter who you are. This is what I love to do: just hanging out with my brother, a really great song, a story, and an audience. Sounds like fun to me.”
“Music is the truth”
The brothers’ point about honesty comes up again and again in their own songwriting. Gunnar said their best-known songs are about letting go of things that weren’t meant to be, at a time when many of their peers were writing about “Mr. Brownstone.”
“For the two of us, no one was going to believe that we grew up living out of a dumpster, so we weren’t cosplaying that way,” he said. “But we grew up in Southern California, and our generation of parents kind of skipped that whole Ozzie and Harriet ideal. So music to us, funny enough, was our salvation.”
He feels much of that story got lost when Nelson took off. “I suppose our record company back in the day did us no service,” he said. “They didn’t talk about the fact that we started playing when we were six, started playing L.A. clubs professionally when we were 12, and always wrote our own stuff. We produced that first record ourselves, and there were grown men who took credit for it that shouldn’t have. They just marketed us as a heavy metal boy band.”
The image stuck. “Matt and I never did a single interview for a teen magazine, ever,” Gunnar said. “But the record company sold all of our pictures to those teen magazines. It was free publicity. Business-wise, very smart. There was no social media; that’s how you did it.” Matthew added that it was the era of New Kids on the Block, “and that’s not what we were doing at all.”
The timing was rough too. After the Rain came out in 1990, not long after the Milli Vanilli lip-sync scandal broke. “People had a horrible taste in their mouth from all of that stuff that wasn’t real,” Gunnar said. “And the two of us had the image that we had. We were guilty until proven innocent, coming from where we come from, the family we come from. So we basically had to go out with a couple of acoustic guitars and the songs that we’d written and come out of the box against the current.”
The songs won out anyway. “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” was one of the top singles of 1990, finishing at No. 27 on Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 and beating out Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” at No. 45.
The brothers said the reception was different in Europe. “There’s no kind of guilty-pleasure vibe with us there; we’re just rock stars,” Matthew said. He sees the same pattern in how critics treated his father. “Ozzie and Harriet made him somebody the critical press didn’t take seriously, a made-for-TV musician. Over there, they didn’t get the show, so he was just like Elvis or Buddy Holly.”
“Relentlessly positive”
The brothers have never gone for the tortured-artist act. Matthew recalled a recent appearance on Billy Corgan’s podcast, where the Smashing Pumpkins frontman paid them a compliment they’ve taken to heart. “He said, ‘I followed you guys and really did some research into you, and you’re relentlessly positive.’ And I think that’s our brand,” Matthew said. “What we chose to do was find the silver lining in any dark cloud and write about it.”
“We’ve never taken that whole woe-is-me, life-sucks sort of thing. And it’s been really annoying to a lot of people, because here we are, over 40 years later, still making music.” — Gunnar Nelson
“I’m not saying it hasn’t been difficult,” Gunnar said. “It’s difficult for everybody. But we just have gratitude for everything, and I think that’s the true wealth in life.”
Matthew added one more reason the memories stay sharp. “We’ve played thousands of shows. And since we’ve never done substances, we remember everything.”
The book: “Now what?”
Last December, the brothers published a book called What Happened To Your Hair? When asked if it’s an extension of the stories they tell on stage, Gunnar was clear that it isn’t.
“It addressed two things,” he said. “One, it told the truth about the preconception that Matt and I were a couple of nepo babies who had a trust fund and were making music as a hobby. And it also tells the truth about what happened in our dad’s plane crash, for the first time. We weren’t allowed to talk about that up until now. So that was very important to us.”
Ricky Nelson died on December 31, 1985, when the plane carrying him and his band crashed in Texas. The twins were 18. In the book, they finally give their own account.
Beyond that, Gunnar said, the book isn’t a family history but their own story. “Everyone’s got a journey; ours was just an epic one that required two people to weather.” It covers the industry’s paradigm shift when grunge took over, and a childhood that was nothing like the TV version of the Nelson household.
“Matt and I were latchkey kids, and music was our salvation,” he said. “That’s what got us out of the family ghetto that we found ourselves in at that time. Our dad was on the road all the time. Our mom was addicted and self-absorbed. And Matt and I were like an afterthought. Back in that day, people were expected to have kids, and when you were a Nelson, you were really expected to have kids. But then you have the kids. Now what?
“Fortunately, Matthew and I came into this world together, and we pretty much raised ourselves. And the through line always was music. Music was the hope in our lives.”
No ghostwriters, and three blank pages
As heavy as some of it is, Matthew said the book takes its tone from one of their father’s rules. “He said, ‘Never lose your sense of humor, because you’re going to need it,’” Matthew said. “This book, it’ll make you cry, but it’ll make you laugh out loud. A lot of people told us that in the same sentence, they cried and laughed.”
That tone is why they wrote it themselves. “We have a certain rhythm and a certain tone, and that’s why we didn’t use any ghostwriters,” Matthew said. “Gunnar took a chapter, I took a chapter. For as much as people saw us on MTV, when we looked like hot Swedish chicks, they really didn’t know what made us tick. I think it answered that question.”
The humour starts on the back cover. “You always have the superlatives on the back cover that people are reading in the airport,” Gunnar said. “In contrast, on our back cover, the first quote is: ‘I was married to their father. I am not impressed. — Mom.’”
Gunnar’s favourite part is Chapter 45. “The title of the chapter is ‘All of the Things We Have to Say About Our Ex-Wives,’ and it’s three blank pages,” he said. “I know that everybody upsells and stuff, but seriously, it’s different, man. You’re going to have a great time, I promise.”
The book is available on Amazon, and the brothers also recorded the audiobook themselves. Fans hoping to buy a copy at Fallsview should plan ahead, though. Bringing merchandise across the border is a hassle. “We get the full cavity search when we want to bring merch across the border,” Gunnar joked. Matthew suggested ordering it ahead of time: “If you order one on Amazon, we’d be happy to sign it.”
A Canadian connection
In August 2016, the brothers played the CNE Bandshell in Toronto performing Ricky Nelson Remembered and threw in a couple of Nelson tunes, including (Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection. When the song finished, they told the crowd that Canadian band Platinum Blonde is a big inspiration to them and they used to have their album Standing In the Dark on repeat. They said the album was an inspiration to them and had helped shape After the Rain.
“(Platinum Blonde singer) Mark Holmes was in the audience when you saw us,” Matthew said. “We didn’t know it. He was there with you when you were seeing that show.”
“We had no idea,” Gunnar added. “Pretty cool, man. I just love Platinum Blonde. I thought that was so cool. ‘Standing in the Dark’ and all that.”
The twins are also big fans Niagara Falls’ own Honeymoon Suite. Gunnar called singer Johnnie Dee “badass” and said guitarist Derry Grehan is “just such a great guy.”
The twins said they would love to do a tour package featuring Nelson, Platinum Blonde and Honeymoon Suite. “It would be so nice to tour with those two bands in Canada, just to go across Canada, the three of us,” Matthew said. “What a good tour that would be!”
When asked if they would ever try to set something up, Gunnar replied, “We’re gonna try. I think that’d be amazing. Why not?”
Canadian promoters, take note.
Still living the dream
The brothers aren’t slowing down. A new Nelson album is due in February on Frontiers Records. “It’s a great record,” Gunnar said. “And we haven’t quit, man. We love it.”
They also picked up a whole new audience last year. Nelson were featured in the 2025 season finale of HBO Max’s Peacemaker, an episode titled “Full Nelson,” performing “To Get Back To You” while John Cena’s Peacemaker watched from the crowd. Series creator James Gunn also directed the song’s music video, which uses footage from the episode.
They’ll put the arena-rock gear away for a bit when they reach Niagara, though, and spend a week in October with their dad’s songs, his set list, and the old family footage. Every night is different, Matthew said, and that’s still the appeal after thousands of shows.
“Here we are, over 40 years later, still making music, still writing books, still playing shows and having a great time,” Gunnar added. “We are truly living the dream.”
Going by this conversation, Grandma Harriet was right: for Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, it has never been the entertainment business. It’s the connection business.
Ricky Nelson Remembered with Matthew and Gunnar Nelson plays eight shows at the Avalon Theatre, Fallsview Casino Resort, Niagara Falls, Ontario, October 14-18, 2026. CLICK HERE for more info and tickets.
What Happened To Your Hair?! is available on Amazon in print and as an audiobook they narrate themselves.
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